A mother and daughter who became trapped in a smoke-filled hallway were among three people killed and five critically hurt by a fast-moving fire in an upper Manhattan apartment building early Monday, officials and neighbors said.
The blaze broke out on the second floor of the six-story building on Dyckman St. near Broadway in Inwood about 12:30 a.m. and quickly grew to three alarms as it spread up the building’s lone staircase to eight apartments. FDNY officials said. Firefighters were on scene in three minutes.
“This fire was a very serious fire,” said FDNY Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said. “It unfortunately resulted in many patients.”
A brother of the building’s super told the Daily News that surveillance footage in the building showed a fifth-floor resident and her adult daughter becoming disoriented while trying to fleeing down the building’s stairwell.
“The cameras show them going up and down, not sure how to get out,” said 73-year-old Pablo Rodriguez. “If they’d gone up to the roof and crossed over, they would have been safe.”
Rodriguez said the older woman’s husband darted out the fire escape and survived. He was later spotted at the scene, desperately searching for his wife and daughter, sources said.
The other fatal fire victim was a man living in a fourth-floor apartment, Rodriguez said.
Alexis Rodriguez, 44, said his wife and two sons, ages 4 and 7, are at Harlem Hospital, while his 18-year-old daughter is at Jacobi Medical Center. All four are intubated in critical condition. His family lives on the sixth floor.
“I’m going back and forth between the two hospitals. all of my family are intubated,” said Rodriguez. “I can’t talk to them. They are critical and they’re just trying to maintain them.”
“My older daughter is the one that is more burned,” he added. “My wife also, her hands are burned.”
Rodriguez said he was working at Rockefeller Center when the fire broke out.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I wish I was there … I’m praying.”
Medics treated 14 people, including a firefighter with minor injuries. Three residents died at the scene, while five more were hospitalized with critical injuries, FDNY officials said. Four more residents were taken to local hospitals with moderate or minor injuries.
The owners of the apartment building are being sued by the city for neglecting fire hazards at a neighboring property at 209 Dyckman, court documents show. The NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development has filed a legal petition accusing Jan Jan Realty Corp., which buildings records list as also the owner of the fire-ravaged building, of neglecting hundreds of unsafe code violations at the property next door.
Rita Vega, 35, who lives on the second floor, was awakened by the smoke detectors.
“We started to smell the smoke as we were coming down, so we were just coughing,” she said. “It was a lot of smoke.”
The fire was brought under control at 3 a.m. Its cause has not yet been determined.
About 100 residents were displaced by the fire. Tenants are not expected to move back into their apartment until Wednesday, Council Member Carmen De La Rosa said.
Lilian De Los Santos, 63, who has lived on the second floor for two years, said the fire forced her to go out the back of the building.
“One lady, when she went out, she broke a leg when she came down the fire escape,” De Los Santos said in Spanish. “I wanted to help the lady who broke the leg but I couldn’t help. I said, ‘’I’m sorry.’”
Michael, 30, who lives on the fifth floor, could see smoke coming in under his apartment door.
“When I tried leaving the building on the main stairs, the fire was all in the hallway,” he said. “It was too hot. I opened the door but the fire tried to get in the apartment. I closed the door.”
He used the fire escape instead.
Fire officials said that, once again, open doors near a central staircase had allowed the flames to intensify and shoot upstairs to other apartments.
“We are still working with the fire department and with the Department of Buildings to determine what the cause of the fire was and also whether there was any negligence on the part of the landlord that contributed to the fire,” said Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Diana Levy.
“It is under the housing maintenance code a requirement that all doors be self closing. And so if tenants are propping them open, we do need to do more to educate them on why not to do that. But we also need to make sure that landlords are complying with making sure all doors are self closing.”
Mayor Mamdani said firefighters have enough obstacles to deal with without the added challenges of fire-feeding open doors and vehicles that block fire hydrants.
“There have been a number of times where I’ve responded to fires, I’ve arrived on the scene to meet the incredible first responders that our city has, and have been shown the fact that there was a car parked in front of a fire hydrant that then delayed the response to a five-alarm fire,” Mamdani said at an unrelated news conference in the Bronx.
U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who represents the area, called the fire “a horrible tragedy.”
“This is a very old building,” he said at the scene. “It’s a landmark building. It’s one of the longest and oldest buildings in the neighborhood.”
With Josephine Stratman